1. Field Of The Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for monitoring contact sessions of a contact center.
2. Description of Related Art
Contact centers, including traditionally voice-only call centers as well as multimedia contact centers adapted to handle contacts in other media, employ numerous agents, having various skillsets, to service customer load. Meeting the needs of the customers in a timely and efficient manner is paramount to a successful and profitable contact center and accordingly, it is often desirable for a third party to monitor a contact session between a customer and an agent, for supervising or training purposes for example.
In general, new agents are trained in a particular skill by subjecting them to canned examples of contact sessions using flash video and audio recordings. Although canned material provides useful general instruction for the trainee, it is not, by its very nature, specific to current real-time contact center activity, such as dealing with current events or new commercial offerings.
Contact center agents have attested that being exposed to experienced agents partaking in contact sessions is a very effective learning method. Thus, the trainees are often assigned to an experienced agent to gain first hand knowledge of how the agent deals with various contacts. Physical proximity to a trained agent thereby enables the trainee to monitor the agent's desktop interaction as well as the contact sessions assigned to them.
The normal talk-time in a non-predictive contact center is approximately thirty-five minutes per hour. Therefore, a trainee assigned to an agent is benefiting from the agent's interaction with contacts for around 50% of the allotted training time. It will also be appreciated that the physical presence of a trainee may have an adverse effect on an agent, distracting them from dealing with their assigned contacts in an effective and timely fashion. Furthermore, agents are skilled in various skills relevant to the contact center, for example, technical support, sales, languages etc, and it may be the case that some of the contacts assigned to the agent are not relevant to the trainee's training program.
Supervisors of contact centers are, in general, provided at their terminal, with an interface displaying a grid of the agents of the contact center under their supervision. If a supervisor wishes to monitor a session between a given agent and a customer, the agent is selected and a request is sent from the supervisor's terminal to a contact center server. In response to the request, the contact center server is arranged to fork the session to the supervisor's terminal, to thereby enable a supervisor to monitor the session between the agent and customer.
Therefore, there is a need to provide improved methods and systems for monitoring contact sessions of a contact center.